Lloyd Gretton: Sargon Press

My infant roots

The first cinematic image of myself, is my sitting on a coral shore, my baby mouth thrown back and lustily drinking from a giant coconut. I am a chubby pinkish baby, blooming in health. If the baby is child of the man, I should be now a tubby loafer and beachcomber. Instead, I look like a thin middle aged intellectual. That's when I'm not looking shambolic.

A regular question asked of me by polite strangers is, 'Were you born in New Zealand?' Until very recently that used to vex me, and I would reply yes. But lately, I say, 'No, I was born in Kiribati.' I avoid saying I came to New Zealand when I was two years old.

I have read somewhere that your first two years are crucial in shaping the sapling that becomes your tree of life. While the mainstream of my generation were being moulded by the maternity wards and Plunket nurses, I was nursed by grass skirted bronzed islanders in a tropical coral sea. I have felt precious all my life. I have survived mammoth disappointments, pain, poverty, fear, humiliations. But there is one thing I cannot take. That is not to be thought precious. Only then do I become very angry and vindictive. Only then also do I start to strive to prove my detractors wrong The New Zealanders always wait to prick and sabotage with glee us elitists. In the nature of crowd bullies, they know not what they do.

It is my credo that being an elitist is a small and forgivable fault. We bleed too. We too are desperate for public respect. We have brought more good than injury to humankind. Indeed the history of our achievements is the best part of the history of human kind. But try explaining that to New Zealanders. That smug tribe who have given to the world, S.O.E.s, C.H.E.s, Tipene O'Regan, and Mercury Energy. We make others feel good when we are proved wrong. That doesn't happen very often.

When I was a young teenager, Coronation Street's brawler and boozer, Len Furclough, aroused universal adulation. If he actually didn't, that was the impression I naturally absorbed. The priggish intellectual and do gooder, Ken Barlow, was a wet balloon to be pricked and squashed in his every scene in the street. I relished his humiliation every time. Now, Ken is rapidly turning into the post modern version of the gossipy, pathetic Albert Tatlock. Len has been reinvented as the entrepreneur Mike Baldwin. In the same time span, society's values have shifted from the cult of the mediocrity to the lean and mean. Lean and mean is just mediocrity in drag.

When post apartheid South Africa was the public idol for some brief months, people told me they thought I was a South African. They were judging me by my accent. I was taken aback as that accent had always had nasty connotations for me. My accent is in fact country Maori English. From the age of two to nine, I lived in a North Island East Coast country district. I was laughed at in a Gisborne school for saying neine instead of noine. It is a charming linguistic oddity that country Maori does sound like white South African. Next time you hear a white South African, close your eyes and listen to its swaggering, well modulated and dry humorous tone. Then imagine you were listening to a New Zealand First electorate politician.

My parents are New Zealand born. My father was the headmaster of George V high school in the British Gilbert Islands colony.

When I was two years old, my family returned permanently to New Zealand. By the age of two, I had travelled half way around the world three times. My father took up the position of head teacher of the primary school at Hicks Bay. Hicks Bay is a Maori community on the East Coast of the North Island. It is about one hundred miles north of Gisborne. We lived there for seven years. Then we went to live on a citrus orchard near Manutuke, seven miles south of Gisborne.

My earliest memory is sitting meditatively outside the window wall classroom while the Hicks Bay primer children worked. I have heard that one's earliest memory reflects one's most profound emotion. My most inner core of consciousness has been watching and listening outside a window of opportunity. Somehow never getting inside that window, and feeling a lethargy that I am really more content to stay outside and dream of it. To enter that classroom might be to reveal my failings and the failings of others.

By the time we left Hicks Bay, I had four brothers and sisters. My elder brother was five years older then me, the other three were born at Hicks Bay. These nine years cover the mid 50s to the early 60s. The rituals and dramas of rural Maori life of these years have been transmuted into the books of the first Maori authors. As the Pakeha school teacher family, we have been transformed into their cold fish. We do not weep at funerals. We do not laugh and sing at parties. Our faces are for ever joyless. We lust only after individual success and material trappings.
We have great difficulty recognising ourselves in this literary convention. Part of the confusion may be, we unconsciously strove for politeness and decorum in the presence of our Maori neighbours and friends. There was always the danger of losing not just a friend but all their friends and relations also with a bad word slipped out.
If Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera had been able to turn themselves into flies on our wall, they might have been very surprised. There might now be an entirely different fashionable notion about Pakehas, that strange stiff unhappy breed who only materialise fitfully when there are Maoris around being Maoris.

Hicks Bay is an important part of the Ngati Porou iwi. Those years belong now to an era not vanished but transmuted from it into something different. Ngati Porou whose stronghold is north of Gisborne were mostly kupapa in the nineteenth century New Zealand wars. Kupapa is translated for political ends now as collaborators or traitors. Such pejorative translations are disliked and not used by East Coasters, Maori or Pakeha. My own linguistic deduction is: kupapa means ku- close to, papa-land. Ngati Porou kupapa recognised no foreign masters, either Maori or Pakeha. Most North Island tribes during the wars pledged their lands to the Maori King. Kupapa kept their lands close to their chests.

The historic consequences were, Ngati Porou leaders became rich landowners and power brokers on the East Coast in both Maori and Pakeha communities. James Carroll and Apirana Ngata parallel the prestige of the first East Coast Pakeha missionaries and land owners. Ropata, the Ngati Porou general against Te Kooti, was a lawman legend on the Coast until the arrival of the first picture theatre and Tom Mix.

For poor East Coast Pakehas such as a schoolteacher family this had important implications. There was no land seizures by the Crown north of Gisborne. Our presence at Hicks Bay seemed to be of an organic nature. The Ngati Porou's historic enemies were the Germans and the Nga Puhi. The Germans were admired as seasoned warriors, the Nga Puhi were disliked as predatory invaders in Hongi Hika's era.

At an inter school footy competition at Manutuke, we Gretton children got it in the neck for owning land stolen from Te Kooti's mother. That was a good Maori yarn as we Pakehas would condescendingly call it. Our orchard land had been purchased in a Maori sale. Such pedantry is of no bother to East Coasters Maori or Pakeha except for a few aficionados of local history.

The discovery of a general Pakeha land conspiracy was in those early years but a gleam in a few academics' eyes. So we Gretton children felt as sure about the land beneath our feet as if our ancestors had lived there since the beginning of time. The great Captain Cook was our founding father.

In his novel The Matriarch, Witi Ihimaera writes that Pakehas will avoid the subject of Te Kooti and the Matawhero retaliation. He offers the opinion that the Pakehas feel too insecure about their presence to discuss it. The truth is East Coast Pakehas will not talk about the massacre in the presence of Maoris. They have no such insecurity. They don't want to upset their Maori listeners with their latent fears about Maori gangland behaviour.

One's recalled life from four to nine has no chronology. One has instead a set of fragments of intensely remembered happenings. One is intensely self centred. At least I was. Maybe a Ngati Porou child would have memories of a more collective nature. We white children lived in a child centred environment. Ngati Porou children seemed to be an essential part of their whanau work unit.

We were familiar with grandmothers. I don't recall them instructing us children in our whakapapa. Mortality denied us any grandfathers. A Scottish Grandma and her sister on Dad's side enthralled me with their great antiquity. They arrived at Hicks Bay as mossy and silver skinned and bent as great old oaks. My whakapapa reveals itself in one tatty tiny photograph of Grandma and her brothers and sisters as children with their widowed mother in Lancashire, England. Our socialistic education had taught us to feel guilty because they were oppressed because they were working class. With twenty years' inculcation of feminism, we now understand my grandmother and her sister were self employed loom weavers. Emigration and marriage in New Zealand was retrograde.

In my mind's eye, there is a long gravel, later tar-sealed road, descending down from a hill. A large store is on the flat. On the other side there is a row of bungalow houses. The first one opposite the shop is ours. The store, as it is the only commerce at Hicks bay, is always heavily patronised.

Our house and most other Hicks Bay houses had the amenities of electricity and hot running water. A generator in the back yard supplied our electricity.

Dad was one of a holy trinity. The Open Brethren pastor, the school teacher, the constable in that order. We children, white and brown, were in awe of all three.

My birthday is 31 October, Halloween day. On that day in Christian culture, human history collides with the cosmic and the infernal. That day is also in the astrological calendar in the rise of Scorpio. That double whammy has made me psychic, and in communion with my culture's spiritual beings. John Keats shares my birthday.

Been nourished in a white Anglo Saxon Presbyterian world, any psychic talents I may demonstrate are instantly the object of anxiety and derision. Any spiritual communion is instantly certifiable as loony. Loony is after all a tacit guilty admission there is a communion out there with the cosmos. Psychic knowledge happens to me irregularly. My spiritual communion was through books. I know no earlier time before I fell down a rabbit hole into the world of literature. That was of course praise worthy. Acting out that world in the back garden or under the table occasioned public alarm. Fortunately, my parents had the old fashioned notions that children did have their private little worlds where they should be left alone.

One morning, I was woken up by my big brother Paul, and told today was my first day at school. I was both startled and delighted. I was startled because I seemed to have had no prior warning. No doubt ّI had been warned at least several times. But in my typical lifelong way, I had not registered with the obvious. I was delighted because home and school were separated by a fence and gate, and Dad was Lord of both. The primer classroom was already a favourite haunt. I danced around big brother, and skipped to school with the innocent joy of a Spring lamb. I have no other memory of my first day.

I have a bundle of memories of the primers. I don't recall disillusionment in my instant transformation from camp pet to foot soldier. The small child takes each experience for its literal worth. I cast my memories to their most far recesses, and find I am sniffing the air of the infant class. There is a tang of sour urine in the air. It assaults me when I get closer to a girl. I can still remember her name, Margaret. We were the best of friends. The other silent and invisible presence in the classroom, was my realisation one morning that we children shared alike and opposite genitalia. There was sometimes ducking under the tables and whispering. Slow as ever, I never cottoned on to the literal facts about this play. By the time I looked, they had disappeared. But somehow I knew with great excitement the essence of the mystery. My elder sister, Becky, was born in the middle of my primer sojourn. Maybe that was how I knew about the opposite sex. I even
had a childish wet dream. The wetness was urine.

If most of my life I have veered between the trough and the mountain top, the primers was my initiation. I shall now go into the vexed matter of my disability. I shall call it that in its literal sense, not as a euphemism. It strikes when I least expect it, and in humiliating public occasions. But it is neither injurious to general health nor a problem health professionals can cure or much ameliorate. I shall explain the mystery as concisely as I can.

Imagine someone is showing you a manipulative task that involves the passing to and fro of two or several activities.
A common one is the tying of shoe laces. Now imagine you can understand the process as it happens before your eyes. You are confident you can do it too. You take up the task, and instantly like a film sequence disappeared off the screen, it vanishes out of your mind. You stand there stupidly. You pick up the impatience of your instructor. You begin to feel yourself entirely shutting down. That is the escape route. Those few minutes of shame and helplessness pass, and you are back to normal. But of course the witnesses of your humiliation have not forgotten. A little bit more of your sense of well being is impaired. Next time with the same task, you are likely to be worse. The next day, you and your peers are given a task of unusual complexity but not involving that multitudinous passing to and fro. Your previous humiliation motivates you to persistency and extra care. You astonish everyone by shining at it and actually surpassing most. Your normal
disorientation between left and right activities on rare occasions actually aids you. You are almost equally balanced on both your sides. For example, most children soon tire of stilts. But once you have got your balance, almost no new deed cannot be surmounted. You spin, you walk backwards, you climb up and down concrete steps. You become the maestro of stilts, a horde of children follow you. The world sees this and starts thinking, 'He put on yesterday's helplessness to tease us.' Maybe like the slave who feigns stupidity and helplessness as his only defence in a power mad world, you are not always completely innocent. That is especially the case with interfering grandmothers.

I shall now touch delicately on the matter of the mountain top. The reading skill, in Western culture the most exalted, of childhood arts, I took to as effortlessly as a duckling in water. To avoid mixing the metaphor, imagine a duckling being carried by a mountain stream and you have me reading Janet and John. I instantly left the other children far behind. My disability did not bother me there. Once I caused a fuss by planting vegetable shoots with their roots in the air. When sometimes I read my book upside down, I continued to read as effortlessly.

My primer class had a drawing task. I remember it was every morning. We each had to draw a pussy cat on the black board. Then we had to stand beside it, and wait for its inspection by the infant teacher. An unsatisfactory task gave you a whacking with a thick ruler. I recall being whacked every morning. After this had gone on for some time, I thought something should be done about this. I went to Mum, and nonchalantly asked her to show me how to draw a pussy cat. She patiently showed me in a few minutes. I was thrilled, and looked forward to winning praise from the infant teacher. That never happened because the lesson suddenly stopped. That sudden ending of tasks when I had just mastered them and never experienced the rewards would be a phenomenon that fate seemed to have selected to especially torment me.

This almost schizophrenic split between mental and bodily capacities has huge implications in my life. Almost as if a natural compensation, my mind seems to sometimes take over tasks normally delegated to the body. A book or a day dream can lure me into almost an hypnotic condition. An absorption in harmonic sounds and novel thoughts can intoxicate me to eerily engage in a strange self possessed dance like the corpses in the desert in the book of Ezekiel. I frequently amuse myself and sometimes others with re-enactments of comic events years ago. Or I am driven into a self possessed rage at events I should have decently buried years ago.

I have the eccentric but not the harmful symptoms of autism. Even now as I tap this into my computer, my left hand is constantly tossing and spinning a pencil. I can't stop myself fiddling inanimate objects. I commonly walk on my toes. I am either strangely silent in company, or take over in hyperactive conversation or mimicry. As I speak animatedly, my hands follow and evoke my words. I am either docile, most of the time, or induced to rages. I am tardy in picking up the social graces and the signals for social behaviour.

I shall tell you one less embarrassing story of being publicly caught out. Aunty Joy came though the back door, and gestured to Mum to come over. They watched me dancing in my high chair to the harmonic sounds from the radio.

Some areas of logic including drawing skills, abstract mathematics, foreign language oral acquisition seem permanently blocked out to any learning. I was four years old before I spoke anything in the English language. Then I spoke a sentence, a complaint about my cold feet and a wish for footwear. I can become affected with a dissonance with the world and people around me. Practical instructions of a small degree of complexity can completely baffle me. Mechanical objects can arouse in me superstitious fear and helplessness. This can be overcome with excruciating slowness. My sense of direction is disorientated very easily. Under stress, I can become confused in my thoughts and speech. But I can uncannily work out patterns of meaning in contradictory events or texts that seems to elude everyone else. At least I can offer an intriguing if eccentric argument. I have a retentive memory for obscure facts if they excite me. I can have charming manners
and a sharp wit. My mind seems to operate on a not entirely normal set of neurons.

This is a heavy load, and a deficit in a work a day world. I would not however like to be an ordinary person. I simply cannot imagine it. This is the true story of growing up with an unrecognised disability combined with an over able intelligence and sensitivity. That state has its own unique terrors and frustrations, especially in a society that fears both. Nothing in this story has been fabricated or modified. A few names have been changed to protect the guilty. I shall conclude this diagnosis with the thought that I have learnt through my life to be sufficiently well adjusted and practical to live independently. I have learnt how to appropriately suppress my nature, and to use coping strategies.

One morning, the doctor was summoned to my bedside. He positioned his stethoscope over my chest. He then went out of my bedroom and whispered something to Mum. Mum reappeared with an anxious look. The doctor had said I was to spend a few weeks in bed. I had been slightly bothered by a small fever. The news immediately filled me with a warm glow of happiness. I disappeared under the sheets. Outside there was the bustle of living. Porridge was being hastily swallowed. A tie was being straightened, lunches cut, childish squabbles, the slamming of the front door. I remained in my warm cave. I was a bear in hibernation.

When the warmth of Spring touched the silent Winter land, I poked an eye out of my cave. An arm's length away, there was a book. I reached out and grabbed it. I propped myself up over my pillow. I was in Paradise. My Winter hibernation and Spring resurrection had lasted in all five minutes.

Paradise transported me to a land of castles, Princes, damsels, and witches. As I sojourned in that world, I kept the corner of one eye fixed on my class mates play under the dozy supervision of Mr Bear in the footy grounds outside my window. Their shrill shouts reached me. How I pitied them.

Mr Bear deserves a page in this memoir. The Grettons called him Eddie Bear from the Pooh Bear stories. If he were reincarnated on the Coast today, he would not stand out too much. In my childhood, he was an incredible bloated hulk among mostly lean hard working men. He taught the classes standard one to standard three in a fashion most kindly described as eccentric.

When Mr Bear instructed you to turn to a page of your textbook, you never knew whether it would be page 4 or page 206. His drone of instruction penetrated outside the school. It drove one school inspector to sleep. I sat beside Margaret. On my other side, Edward half the time excruciatingly twisted my ear. Maybe I exaggerate. When I remet him in my teens, my younger brother, Scott, mentioned it and he looked ashamed. Several times in the week, Mr Bear dozed off into the world of Nod. Then the class exploded into a kids' playground. I recall always in these times sitting placidly with a book in my own little world. Then Mr Bear would wake up with a jolt. He would then summon a child- it was always a standard three girl- to pimp on us with a marker at the back board. Pimp was our word for nark. Any sound from us would promptly get our name written on the blackboard. I alas lost in my book would always forget the pimp. Then I would remember with alarm and
check the blackboard. Always to my horror, in a list there would be my name. Then having stretched and invigorated himself, Mr Bear would take out a long stick and stand at the blackboard. Each child on the list, at his summons, would stand in front of the blackboard. Then Mr Bear would whack each one once on the rear. The first time, I waited in mute terror. When my name was called, I walked to the blackboard and waited. Whack, that was it. I returned to my desk. After that first time, the chastisement was painful but routine.

Mr Bear had a more devilish punishment for more naughty children. He would first clear a space in the middle of the room. Then he would summon the boy or girl to stand in the middle of the space and bend over. While we waited in nervous anticipation, he drew up his boot and slammed his big sheathed toes into the child's bottom. Once we must have upset him because he threatened the next time he would kick someone through the wall into the next classroom. An unfortunate boy copped it. This time Mr Bear took a run and kick. The boy did become almost airborne. We kids screamed with laughter. This time there were brief tears.

The only academic lesson I can recall of Mr Bear's is his recount of Kupe's discovery of Aotearoa. Mr Bear had been an Hollywood small star. We listened entranced to his story of the migration of the great fleet.

I can also recall his spine chilling reading of Ali Baba and the forty thieves.

He led us in songs about baby Jesus and our hearts overflowed in unison in aroha.

Scott, my younger brother, once paid us a visit. He fled back home in terror when he encountered Mr Bear through the classroom window in the climax of a haka challenge.

Mr Baker once sent a dullard standard three boy back to the primer class. Not content with inflicting that humiliation, he sent us children to spy on him through the primer classroom window. We screamed with laughter at the sight of him sitting on the floor with the primer children. They were all absorbed in building a house of blocks. In that lesson in scapegoatism, the dullard showed brahman wisdom.

Snug in my bed after a week of convalescence, I gave respectful attention to the anxious visit of our Sunday school teacher, Miss Eisler. She left me some Sunday school literature. My image of the Passion of Christ has its genesis in those Open Brethren papers. Christ triumphant, tortured, triumphant again in a dry Bedouin land haunted me as if the young man with the burning kind eyes lost and found in a sea of feckless humanity was my own grandfather. Dad came home with an armful of books from his standard four- six class. I quickly lost interest in all except one, Rama and Sita. The opportunist tossed away his dry Protestant Church, and entered, like De Quincey, lush hypnotic Asia. My stuffy bedroom was India from the snowy Himalayas to tropical Ceylon. God Vishnu descended from Heaven, became the baby Rama, won Sita in an archery contest, slew her ten headed twenty armed monster kidnappers. He rescued Sita, and they lived happily ever after and
founded a dynasty.

When I looked up at the full moon through my window, I recalled how baby Rama reached up from his cradle to play with it as a toy. I was gloriously happy. To be a convalescent and not actually sick was my highest nirvana.
The doctor called back. He stuck his stethoscope over my chest, and fitted tubes into his ears. He pursed his lips. He turned to Mum and Dad, hovering in the background. 'He's as fit as a fiddle', he said.

My parents beamed. He seemed disappointed and cross with me. I was puzzled. Was I supposed to be sick?

'He can get out of bed now', he said.

He followed my parents into the kitchen. I jumped out of bed. I knew I had somehow transgressed, but I was baffled at what I had done. I quietly put on my clothes, and slipped out of the house. The doctor and my parents were having a cup of tea. I breathed the air. Suddenly I knew what it was to be healthy and free. I hurried over to the school footy field. It was deserted. I set myself an old goal to run around the field one hundred times. I started. I sniffed the air. My feet flew. I was no longer someone else, I was myself. Faster and faster I ran until my asthmatic lungs gasped, and my legs became leaden. Paul appeared at my side. The doctor had seen me through the kitchen window. I was to come home at once. I was mortified. I had unwittingly displeased the good doctor again.

I returned home, and slunk into the boys' outside tent. I contented myself with building a house of cards, and then watching its crash. It was tea time. I returned inside. Tomorrow it would be back to school.

I shall tell one more tale out of school about Mr Bear. One day, Mr Bear suddenly announced that tomorrow standard one would have a spelling test. There would be one strap for each mistake. That our laid back teacher had turned overnight into a martinet did not at all surprise us. My class mates were not in the least put out, but I was alarmed. Our spelling syllabus was progressive education. We learnt not by rote but by using words that came naturally out of our experience. As a consequence we were all at sea. I cannot remember whether I swatted up my spelling book. I probably didn't. Tomorrow was a long way away, and Mr Bear had a short memory. But the next morning, Mr Bear instructed standard one to take out their pencils and books for the spelling test. I nervously struggled through the jumble of words. Then we had to change our books with the person beside us. I changed with Margaret. Then we had to call out our results. I had made two spelling
mistakes. Margaret had made a few. I was astonished. Every other pupil had made no mistake at all. Then Mr Bear summoned Margaret and me to his big desk. He pulled out his big leather strap. I recall the strapping. But I have no memory of its effect.

After my experience with nurse Banks' hypodermic needles, the other Banks' adage about wet bus tickets must have applied. We children were stuck with needles with the frequency and nonchalance of pin cushions. Maori schools copped that much more than the other schools. I was quite surprised to learn one morning from Margaret that was for our own good. Older boys would take off for the day into the lupins outside the school at the news of the imminent arrival of Nurse Banks. She would do the whole school of about a hundred pupils on half a dozen needles. Sometimes a doctor's ministrations were required later. Today an injection is the only physical discomfort that makes me feel faint.

After our punishment as Margaret and I walked back to our desk, I noticed all the other children were staring at me and grinning ear to ear. At morning play, the news swept though the school. Scott rushed home to tell Mum. I was angered. I had fronted up and taken my punishment. Now why should I be singled out? At lunch break which we Grettons had at home, Mum asked me about my punishment. I quickly explained. Mum kept up a brave neutrality.

The Maori children seemed to take their Maoritanga for granted. As a general rule, their grandparents could speak and understand it, their parents could understand it. I asked a school mate once could he speak Maori. He said he only knew a few words. But maybe that general rule was a Pakeha supposition, and they were hiding something from us. At the school centennial twenty four years after we left Hicks Bay, a pupil of Dad's addressed the assembly in Maori with the fluency and repartee of an expert speaker. The Hicks Bay children in the 1960s did not communicate in Maori at least in our presence. We were frequent visitors to their homes. But the children of leading families were, I think, versed in the korero as a formal language for Maori ceremonies. My uncertainty about this demonstrates that language was not an issue of the 60s.

School Certificate was the ticket to the Western world. Few alas made it, and those that did were treated as very special. The canyon between School Certificate and education at Hicks Bay applied to all children. The head teacher's children were not immune.

Once after a reading of Huckleberry Finn, Dad asked his class who would like to be Huckleberry Finn. Only his own son and the white girl of the shop keeper put up their hands. I am not suggesting that Huckleberry Finn was the world of all the Maori children. But the Maori children had been exposed to the vicious world of child neglect and abuse. No novelist's romantic hue could fool them.

The contemporary media feeds us with daily disturbing images of child abuse and neglect cases. In the 1960s, most of these things happened to Maori children living on the Coast. Children came to school without lunches. They came to school with signs of physical chastisement. Children fearing hidings ran away and lived rough. Many were malnourished, and showed that by their chronic runny noses and skin sores. But the Hicks Bay children were out of sight out of mind in New Zealand society. The social commentators and politicians had less interest in child abuse than they would have had in a dust storm on Mars.

I recall once waking up in terror in the outside tent in the early hours of the morning. I saw a figure crawling through our bushes. It became still and disappeared as the light descended. I didn't breathe a word about this trespass. I now suspect some poor child had crawled into our garden with the desire for the freedom from abuse and neglect represented by the head teacher's home. As the morning had become light, the child had taken fright. I now wonder if that child was Jake Heke.

So not to be a hypocrite, I shall acknowledge that a more covert version of corporal punishment was also the common lot of Pakeha children. Spare the rod and spoil the child was a motto taken literally by many if not most Pakeha parents. Doctor Spoc appeared to have only a small following in New Zealand. He had the fatal flaw of sounding intellectual, therefore he was only fit to inflame basic instincts among most New Zealand adults.

Paul earnestly wished he was a Maori. Their children had more fun. The quicksilver wit characteristic of the Irish seemed to be their birthright too. They used the English language as a conduit for their sharp mental associations. I am trying to spear a butterfly. Two children could jump up at a school function, and do the twist with a dexterity that would have shamed Elvis. I am incriminating myself now as someone humiliated by Morris dancing. One of those children is now a University Lecturer. All she can remember of Dad now is the glasses and the long nose.

The self appointed Hicks Bay pastor was of the Open Brethren Church. He lived with two women, his wife and a spinster assistant. It was a well known joke that this was a menage a trois although no one believed it. I shall illustrate his character with a story perhaps apocryphal.

Mr Dick was on his way to a Church meeting. He was told by road men that his route was blocked by a river flood. 'The Lord will guide me', replied Mr Dick. He revved his car into the river, and promptly disappeared. The men were getting ready to look for a body when Mr Dick turned up baptised and dishevelled. 'Praise be the Lord, he has redeemed me', explained Mr Dick.

Miss Eisler, the spinster assistant, took the Sunday school class. All the children called her Aunty Doris. The ride in her flash car to Sunday school was the candy for the children. As we were next door to the Sunday school, we Gretton children didn't get the candy and didn't miss it. The feast for all the children was the story telling powers of Aunty Doris as she retold the scriptures. Her lead in with the Old Testament was rather chilling. Her Church took the scriptures neat and without a pinch of salt. I remember being filled with horror as this gentle lady without a blush told us of a cold blooded killing in the Bedouin feuds in ancient ‌Israel. Her vision of the Old Testament was at once spectacularly brutal and ethereal. Maybe that was its appeal to us children. People slaughtered one another with holy glee, but never seemed to have any sort of bodily function. The boy David was our peer hero. Once he was King, we rapidly lost interest.

David, with his lowly status as the last born child, his tricks, his chameleon gifts to outwit the powerful, was a soul brother of Maui. I pictured him to be twelve years old at his slaying of Goliath who was like Mr Bear.

It was with a happy smile, that Aunty Doris could at last set aside the Old Testament and turn to the good news. Angry God the Father, we all recognised. When He ordered Abraham to murder Isaac, our collective blood ran cold. Abraham had already done the dirty on poor illegitimate Ishmael. Some fathers never learn how to accept their children. Now in a miraculous changing of spots-He was God after all-He sent down to earth gentle Jesus. We didn't t know at first, God the father would play the unkindest trick of all on His gentle son. The irascible old bastard must have laughed about it to Kingdom come.

Jesus came to the accompaniment of the singing of angels, and the joy of shepherds and wise rich old men. We loved Jesus, even Mum loved Jesus. I had the feeling she didn't altogether approve of Aunty Doris' instruction. The Passion of Christ puzzled me. Why didn't he just sweep them all away like flies? How could God's only son be so abandoned and even admit defeat? But all was forgiven when Christ ascended from tomb and earth in a trail of glory.

In my judgment, the story of Christ is indeed the greatest story ever told. We children swallowed it whole as unsophisticated people have done so since it beginnings. It is in a few tiny chapters, a birth mystery, a coming of age story, a healing story, a moral teaser and a grave mystery moulded into one great drama. Only someone of story telling genius with a calling to heal diseased bodies and souls could have written its genesis. Maybe he was a physician educated in the literary classics but of humble background. Someone like Chekhov. Indeed like Saint Luke in the Christian tradition.

Jesus suffered so he could forgive our sins. I couldn't really understand that. If I continued to swear inside my head, God would punish me. So what was the point of Jesus' forgiveness? What could be Aunty Doris' sins?

I could best describe the people in our community as a Godly people. Christian forbearance for good and ill had spread unchecked like snow all over the district. The tenets of the ten commandments were believed and followed with the simplicity of faith of Christian communities since biblical times. You could almost say property crime was non existent. Religious piety was practised at every ceremony. Within two lifetimes ago, the ancestors of this community had been a warrior people. That time could not be discarded by even the best of intentions and prayers. In our time it expressed its heated blood in the chronic corrupting influences of alcohol. Men and sometimes women drank at every ready occasion until they were aggressive or besotted. Usually, only at these awful times was the local policeman full time employed. Young unmarried men and women normally got married with the bride pregnant. Mr Dick and his cohorts accepted all sinners into the bosom
of the Church. The district attracted every pot of Christianity. At ceremonies, pastors from the Catholic Church to the Jehovah Witnesses shared the thanksgiving prayers. ‎They blessed that community with Christian spirituality and without sectarianism.

I have made allusions to alcohol and policeman. Their stories on the Coast are intertwined. The Church community had a natural horror of alcohol. Its blight was so pervasive that it would be impossible to separate symptom from cause. From experience not at my home but just outside my door, I too from infancy absorbed its horror. A frequent errand was to collect provisions from the store in the evening. By then, the men had returned from their road work, and were sharing a beer at the back of the council truck by the store. I had to pass within a few metres of these men. They were just jolly, but they filled me with a whiff of what so many of my class mates suffered pere ٍnnially. Even now as I tap the computer, these demons of drink appear before me. A racial fear grips me. I am one white child in the midst of drunken red eyed brown men. To run would be to provoke them. I sneak past. When I think they cannot see me, I run to my front door in
blind irrational terror. I never said anything about my fears. These were our neighbours. So safe did we feel a white family, with most of the contemporary white prejudices, that we never locked our doors at night. Having said contemporary white prejudices, I hope ours were said more in cathartic jest than maliciousness. The Hicks Bay Maoris were at the time our neighbours and best friends.

One morning there was a tidal wave warning at Hicks Bay. The entire community climbed the hills around the bay in great anticipation. But no tidal wave came. Mum was warned by a furious knocking at the door. A fat local man convulsed in sweat and heaving breath stammered to her to take to the hills. His desperate efforts were mimicked to our Pakeha friends and relations for years. Everyone saw the humour, but no one remembered the man was doing his best to save our lives.

The Hicks Bay community was essentially a pre industrial one. The community was emerging from a Christian tribal society into the modern Western world. There was excitement in the air, a sense of great imminent change. Most of the school boys had expectations drawn not out of their traditional community life experiences but out of the American comics and rumours of big city life. They would grow up to fly fighter aircraft, or be as rich as Uncle Scrooge, or as strong as Mighty Mouse.

When I flew on my own from Wellington to Gisborne, even the big boys couldn't get enough of my story. When the visiting Education Department adviser asked our class what did Captain Cook first see when he made landfall in Poverty Bay, most of the class thought it was an aeroplane.

I think the girls still assumed they would grow up to be wives and mothers, and live transformed lives through their men folk.

In such communities living lives between unappreciated realities and unrealistic expectations, the harbingers of the future world have savant status. In Pakeha communities, the school master was assumed to be a decent fellow good on academic subjects but impractical in the real world. At Hicks Bay, the head teacher was accorded a prestige at the top of the traditional hierarchy. As the Hicks Bay school committee said to Dad, 'You make the bullets, and we'll fire them.' The chairman of the school committee was Sugar Houkamau whose whakapapa stretched back to the Maori Gods and whose ancestor signed the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Hicks Bay people expected dedication to the progress of the community from the head teacher. They also expected him to respect them. The school had gone out in strike before our time.

From a Hicks Bay vantage point, Gisborne was the citadel on the hill. Gisborne's commercial centre actually lay on the banks of the Turanganui river. A visit to the township, Te Araroa, was an event. The world opened its gates a crack in Te Araroa. It had its old identities, the Lebanese barber shop, the picture theatre, the district high school with its murder house. In Te Araroa, Dad saw Rebel Without A Cause. He was thunderstruck. The delinquent was the hero, every adult was utterly wet, and the good locals cheered on the delinquent!

A visit to Gisborne was an epochal event. The journey took half a day in our Vauxhall, over gravel roads scarcely improved since the stage coach days. We children invariably vomited in the heat, the engine grind and the dust. I recall vomiting over Scott who had the ill luck to have his head stuck out of the window behind mine.

I visited Gisborne once or twice a year. Gisborne was bright shops, palatial cinemas, and crowds of bustling flash Pakehas. We Gretton boys and our school girl domestic caused a stir when we strolled into a restaurant, and ate from our newspapers fish and chips.

In Gisborne, the Hicks Bay people were swallowed up by strangers. At Hicks Bay, every person had a certain identity. As the locals said, 'We are all one big family". That was literally true for the Maoris. Maoris non Ngati Porou numbered a handful. If they were Nga Puhi, ancient resentments hung over them. We Pakehas were brought into the family if we behaved ourselves. I mean if we were publicly respectful to their mores. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to live there. We were sort of in laws, wealthy with the world at our feet so they thought. But we were definitely insane, and faintly comical. Pakeha residents were identified with the mysterious and invincible workings of the law and the government. There were always however Pakehas who had joined the Maoris through marriage and work. I think they were completely accepted, and their race forgotten. The Pakeha taxi driver, Roger, was born on the Coast, and his accent and life style was
indistinguishable from his Maori neighbours.

There was one tragic racial story. A servant girl from an English village was brought to Hicks Bay by an handsome Maori soldier at the end of the First World War. Before she arrived, the Maoris had to purchase a bed, and take lessons how to make it. These Pakeha women of such marriages survived by having babies and making their homes refuges. But children were denied to her. She never learnt te reo and became slowly paranoiac. Whenever she heard the word Pakeha, she felt all eyes settling upon her. I once went on an errand to her remote cottage. There was no one at the door. I entered the cottage. I walked into a derelict room, and found her sleeping in bed above a brimming potty. I ran home in terror. She died from a chill brought about by trapping herself in a freezing river.

There was another funny Pakeha lady living alone who had gone somewhat batty. One night, Mum and I out for a stroll saw her prowling the neighbourhood with a knife. The common Pakeha wisdom was, white people had to get out eventually before they turned into Maoris or went funny. It was assumed that one was as bad as the other.

I used the rather cruel term funny. That was a catch all Hicks Bay expression for not good or not normal. A hard to follow film was a funny film. There ِwere several other catch all English words used imaginatively in ways not orthodox English. Neat eh was the Maori equivalent of ka pai for everything of admirable quality. Boys dressed like Elvis Presley were to the elderly folk neat eh. Hard case was anything and anyone that bucked the system. A person was a hard case when he started a panic by telling a visiting sports team that a local girl had v.d. It was a hard case when the entire team lined up outside the doctor's door. The Hicks Bay relaxed style could absorb hard case. Unfortunately in the cities, the end journey of a hard case was a prison cell. The community was forgiving but not condoning of their people who got into trouble with the law. Breaking the law was identified with sinning, But in their history their heroes were all hard
cases.

When in adulthood I took the trouble to learn te reo, I found Maori English expressions fitted common Maori idioms. For example, Rachel and thems are going to the river (ko Rachel ma e haere ana ki te awa). You fullas supplied the plural of the second person personal pronoun that is absent in English. 'Are you fullas going in your fullas car?'

I have mentioned Sugar Houkamau. It may seem strange that the most distinguished person at Hicks Bay should be called Sugar. Free use of endearing nicknames did not denote disrespect. Mr Houkamau's presence lay over the district like Ben Cartwright in the television western Bonanza. He bore a distinct resemblance. His presence and word was law. Centuries of tradition had taught his lineage how to hold command over people without having to bully or cajole. Once while he was speaking at the Marae, a drunk interrupted him. He quietly excused himself. In moments, the drunk and his voice had disappeared.

Sugar's death was patriarchal and biblical. He had gone out with his son to round up horses in a storm. A tree crashed on his car killing him instantly.

Such men and women commanded high status over their districts. In the Pakeha urban environments, they were nobodies. Maoris in this era entered the urban scene almost as foreign language immigrants with the consequent powerlessness and indignities. Only a century before, their villages and byways had occupied the districts that became the North Island cities and towns. Now they were returning as factory workers with tongues stumbling in the power language. Most of their young people were not fluent in either language. The Hicks Bay royalty Houkamau became Hockamoo in town. In town, it was commonly said by the kindest people that we should have finished the Maoris off when we could, and left a few intelligent ones to breed into us.

I wish I could tell you of sitting at the feet of wise old men and women under the rafters of a great meeting house. I envy those that have had that revelation of finding a universe in a capsule. I missed that chance as a child, and am now too superficially educated. I have no childhood memory of being inside a meeting house. Maori architecture and art is so much a common background of my Hicks Bay childhood that I cannot isolate set experiences. I can recall sharing with the other children agonizingly long waits outside a building before great mouth watering banquets in a large hall. I assume now that building was the meeting house, and the long waits the oratory and waiata.
I have instead vivid memories of the scary presence of death and ghosts. Old people and a few young children too were dying regularly. Each death was a huge occasion for the district to mourn and reaffirm its common identity. I recall several times funeral laments wafted by the wind over our front lawn. A chorus of adults weeping and singing laments was unsettling for a child schooled in decorum and self control. Birth of new members was conversely little noted at public gatherings. That was the opposite of my family where the birth of its three new members at Hicks Bay were momentous occasions, and death not talked about. These imbalances between district and home concerning life and death unsettled me. The obelisks and raised mounds at the church yard, and the awareness they were covering over corpses could leave me mute with fear. That anxiety was intensified when our primer teacher instructed us all to wash our hands when someone touched the
graveyard fence. It was generally believed that contamination from a graveyard portended bad luck. When the old work man died down our road, I was filled with a morbid curiosity where he had gone. My anxieties over mortality had got mixed up with Aunty Doris' teachings. When I learnt that I too would one day die, I dreamt of lying under the ground while Mum wept above me. I still recall the heavy weight of earth covering me.

We children all shared a terror of ghosts. Stray possums and eerie winds were the catalyst for ghost stories that made us all shiver and dread the night alone. I was thirteen before I found I could wonder alone at night and not be filled with ghostly anxieties.

In between the public grief, there was the life affirmation of football. There were the great national occasions beamed in over the hills via radios and transistors. The All Blacks were remote Gods, the local heroes were the Hicks Bay and Te Araroa champions. The local tournaments were occasions for universal exuberance that made the people dance and hug each other like a revival meeting. Hicks Bay's outstanding player demolished the field under a public admiration that made him the man for all seasons. At least that was my impression. Scott was convinced we were actually watching the All Blacks.

The local policeman joined the Te Araroa football team. He was prone to general stupidity. There was a legend that he once got so so drunk his prisoner had to drive him home. The people respected his badge, and were indulgent to his frailties. We all struggled to keep a straight face when his long bandy legs and dopey face joined the tough young men on the field. Once he got the ball, the opponents obliged him for a while for the public to savour the occasion, and then brought him down like ninepins with a flying tackle. That would crack us all up.

You might be anticipating by now stories of bosom friends. Where there should be bosom friends, there are only sets of vague memories of not so good experiences with other boys. I recall crash dives and underwater somersaults under the tutelage of Paul at the local creek. I recall the terrifying voyages down hill sides on his sledge. Once at least, the sledge and I reversed positions. If I murmured a note of reluctance, I was goaded on by the taunt of sissy. No doubt I was a disappointing little brother who had all the bits but couldn't fulfil his dreams of kingfishing into the creek and whizzing down hills. Talking of bits, he once informed me after we had shared a bath that the top bit of my tapa was missing. I went to Mum for reassurance. 'Yes', said Mum, 'the doctor cut off a little bit at the top to stop the sand giving it a rash in the Gilbert Islands'. My heart sank. Not even Mum could stop mutilations for ever.

One morning, when we were doing the dishes, Paul pointed out the window to the distant bush. 'I bet', he said, 'there is a Maori left over from the Maori wars hiding out there. One day he will jump out on us with his taiaha.' Paul demonstrated the appropriate war cry and attack. I was overawed that a tattooed warrior lived out there. I could recognise them from school pictures. In my thoughts, the Hicks Bay Maoris weren't real Maoris. They were just cheerful, simple souls. All the important people were Pakeha men. I had concluded that a bald head was the sign of great rank as even Dad was humble towards bald school inspectors.

One morning, I suddenly found myself on a long journey with Paul to his friend Gundy's home. The journey was far and over swamp land. He raced joyously ahead of me. 'Come on! hurry up!' he shouted angrily at me.

I splashed sulkily through this Slough of Despond. I didn't want to go to meet his mates and share their adventures. I was in my twilight zone between my difficulties and feigning helplessness. I am cursed with a disposition that if I can't awe them with spectacular style, infuriate them with incompetence. I cut my finger on cutting grass, and with my finger in my mouth, gazed at him mournfully. He was by now beside himself as the evening shadows settled. At last we got there, and I was hurled into the hurly-burly of the Campbell household. Paul was soon hanging out with Gundy. I was the immediate star attraction for the beautiful half dozen Campbell sisters. That night, Mr Campbell announced we children could not have a ghost show. He may have thought I would have bad dreams. A mere oral order never stopped us children of the Coast. As the Campbell elders settled behind The Gisborne Herald newspaper, we children sneaked out the window.

Soon I was ensconced among the Campbell girls, and joining in their screams as weird apparitions jumped out of the curtain. But I knew it was all just fun. Gundy and Paul were behind the curtain, and the ghosts were shining torches and papier maches.

On a following evening, I pissed my pants. That night I was bathed by the half dozen clucking sisters.

We returned home. Mum and Dad must have gone away to Gisborne. Mum told me that Paul was furious with me.

The legendary great Bennion had perhaps inspired Paul and Gundy. He was a travelling magician. In my childhood, he was the only person to drive me into a traumatic wreck. Everyone except the preachers came to the local hall to see his magician shows. The preachers withdrew dignifiedly in the face of impossible competition. He was the old fashioned show man. Young men nearly killed us when they leapt in the air, and flung their arms about in agony as electric shocks convulsed them. They had been ordered to wash plastic babies in bowls of water. They complained of pain for days. A girl did the flamingo, and the older boys at the front were threatened with hypnotism for whistling up her swirling dress. He swallowed burning newspapers down his throat. The boys were full of contempt for that hammy act. For weeks after, we boys swallowed fire emitted from matches in our throats. I remember swallowing fire from burning paper stuffed down my throat by Scott.

The Great Bennion's supreme act threw the people around me into ecstatic shrieks and giggles. It was a dark and stormy night, and he was on a strange journey. At every corner behind wooden houses and trees, white apparitions of skulls and cross bones jumped out at him with shrieks of ooh. My terror drained out all sounds. My heart leapt out of my throat. I was only calmed down by the pantomime and song of I've got a hole in my pocket.

The great Bennion outclassed the single visit of the circus. The lions seemed crestfallen and cowed. Why jump through hoops and yowl on stools when one could be pacing as King of the shadowy jungle? Paul had recently kept me and Mum spell bound one night with his recounting of The Jungle Book. I most enjoyed the shetland ponies. Even though their name was rude and non Christian, like Polly the bus driver who swore at his work. We children all knew he was not a Christian even though he pretended to be one.

As I tap this memoir into my computer, Harry Belafonte is singing on National Radio Around the Bay of Mexico. That delicious song carries to me the odours, the sounds, the heat of Hicks Bay. I am lying on the sofa, half asleep. Mum by the window is sewing on her sewing machine. A fly buzzes over the oven roast, the sewing machine whirls. From the big old radio, the sentimental songs of the era play out. The men and women in these songs of love were the servicemen and the sweet hearts of World War Two. Every servicemen was a hero, so the children thought. They were as automaton in battle as machines, and as strong and brave as lions. They had personally been in the forefront in every battle in their theatre of war. They had killed Germans and Japanese with the thoroughness and expertise that the pioneers had cut down the trees. They did nothing to discourage us from these childish epic tales. Grainy American war comics filled with these war images were
always circulating in school.

The pioneers I only knew from the tales. But my experiences with the World War Two heroes did soon puzzle me. I saw them as fussy pedants with strange phobias over life's pleasures. Their sweet hearts of the war were more brave and capable.

The songs on the radio sang of men's plaintive love for their sweet hearts far distant. They sang of women's longing for the dangerous power of a man. I think of the regular Patty Page song, How much is that doggy in the window. I am sure even the adults assumed it was entirely literal and innocent.

Paul's early morning job was to collect a bucket of skim milk from a local farm. I accompanied him. I can only remember us leaving the outside tent to go to the farm. We may have slept in the tent all Summer. One morning when we got to the skim milk drum, we found a seagull buried inside. When Paul pulled it out, we discovered it was barely alive. We brought it home. Dad took it, and deposited it on the house roof. The seagull stretched out its wings, and seemed to call out into the sky. Our delight and incredulity grew when the sky above became crowded with calling seagulls. Several flew down to the roof. The bird hostage soared up into the sky, and merged into its kin. They were soon lost to sight. Now when I think of that conference of two normally hostile species, I am convinced again. Whenever human societies relearn their behaviour from the animal world, they are on the right track. That seagull colony did not abandon its unfortunate member the
moment it could not help itself. It waited and hoped for the intelligence and compassion of human beings. Its numbers and strength were restored. If we could not have saved the hostage, the colony would in time have departed in sorrow and in safety.

One morning, I didn't want to get out of the camp stretcher. I had a good Donald Duck comic. Donald Duck was not standard literary fare in our household. They were procured in hand me downs from school. There were no accolades for reading Donald Duck although they were not forbidden. Donald and his relations and associates did not share the same literary planet as Alice, Pooh and Ratty in every adult's judgment. I am sure the question never came up. But I seized upon every Donald Duck comic with equal fanatical devotion and day dreaming as I seized upon those classics. Now I hear the author and illustrator of those childhood comics is classed among the greatest of tellers and illustrators of childhood tales. I am not in the least surprised. Under a pale California sun, the nephews of Uncle Donald played in an endless Summer school vacation without child abuse, drugs or assassinations. Their adventures from Mars to Atlantis had a new world brashness that
was unique in my reading and day dreaming.

Hicks Bay was a self contained world. The worlds outside it invaded us through accustomed safe filters. I thought the radio issued forth only sentimental songs. Through the cold print of books, comics and the newspaper, we learnt about strife in the outside world. There were also the movies at Te Araroa, but no one believed their escapism.

Then into this cocoon came Life magazines. Somehow a batch had got into our household. I can only remember two sets of photographs. Their imprints on my memory remain shocking. The two sets came from two different places and times but covered the same theme that rankles us today. Why can't we all get along?
In one, a small boy trembles in terror with his hands above his head while a man with a gun aims at him. He obsessed me. I had never seen anyone before who so looked like me, even down to his gumboots. In the other, black men lay dead on a street while flash cars drove around them. I was carefully schooled about the Holocaust. I received no instruction about apartheid. The dead black men seemed remote from me although their juxtaposition with the flash cars disturbed me.

I wasn't told that my instincts were right. The Jewish boy was my kindred. It wasn't until my late adolescence that I was told of my Jewish background. A few years ago, a University academic was speaking on National Radio about his boyhood in South Africa. He spoke about his Jewish family's fascinated horror of the Nazi era. He couldn't get out of his childish mind the boy in the Warsaw ghetto picture. The Nazis were terrifying bogey men. Hitler's occupied countries were made infernal places. I could not avoid noticing the South African was talking as much about my childhood as his. Since my early adulthood, I have had close encounters with Jewish people. I have not sought that, but it has always happened. That intense feeling about evil in twentieth century Europe is a common chord among us. I have wondered if the world wide image of the Nazis as the twentieth century demons has been created by the Jews in the communicative arts. But I may be on
dangerous grounds so I shall leave that subject alone. I shall just say the holocaust did not make either the Professor's South African family or the Gretton family the slightest bit liberal about apartheid.

Now that I have dwelt upon the murder of the defenceless, I shall tell you about my singular killing. It was the largest creature I have ever killed. I would have been about six. It was an accident, and the creature was a kitten. It did the Saint Vitius dance. For several days the aura of killer hung over me. I prayed to God to forgive me, and smuggled the mother cat into the camp stretcher, and asked her too for forgiveness.

Then one day in the Summer of 1962, we children were told this would be our last Christmas at Hicks Bay. We would be going away to live in a place near Gisborne. That place didn't seem to have its own name. We were going to share a common New Zealand experience. It was time to say goodbye for ever to our Hicks Bay friends.
The school Christmas break up of 1962 was the Gretton apotheosis. In faith with the tradition of the departure of a great chief, the heavens opened up. The festival moved to the primer classroom. The climatic moment was the arrival of Father Christmas. Each year he came to the school on a novel conveyance. The previous year, there had been unusual clowning when not just Father, but a pregnant Mother Christmas with Baby Christmas had arrived in a gig. We waited nervously for what could top that. A motor cycle revved down the school drive. We children rushed to the wall window and planted our noses. Roger, the taxi driver, with a tiny bearded old man about ninety clutching the back seat, ripped round and round the school. Safely arrived in the classroom, Father Christmas distributed small presents to us ever overawed children.

Scott and I spent one evening at God's house. That was the homely dwelling of the Dicks and Aunty Doris. The next morning, we departed in Aunty Doris' flash car to Gisborne. Aunty Doris stopped the car half way on the route so we would share the dust of another vehicle. We left Hicks Bay on good terms, but that dust of departure had its resonances.

Now I shall pass the recounting of the Gretton experience of Hicks Bay to Mum. I think she feels mine is over sensational.

'We were living in a settled, rural, Maori community with strong links to their local Marae. True there were boozing parties but vicious violence was rare, and family life was intact. Most families had working fathers and heavy drinking was mostly restricted to the males. There was a clear demarcation between the drinking families, and the Salvation Army or Mr Dick converts, who eschewed smoking, alcohol and swearing. Even shut up was looked upon as swearing by these good folk. Most of the women in our rural community were not drinkers but worked long, hard hours milking the small herds of cows with help from family members. The older girls in the household helped with the household chores and cared for the little ones at home. There was much bonding between these older children and their younger siblings. Large family were a source of pride and on Mothers Day, as the Family Benefit day was called the ten shillings per child paid to each mother gave
these women an independence not evident today. Clothes were simple with brand names unknown. On hot summer days when the tank water ran out, whole families bathed in the Wharekahika river, did their massive loads of washing in the river and draped it over the bushes to dry. Clothes lines were rarely seen and fences were used instead. The top wire often being barbed wire helped anchor the clothes- no need for pegs. Most of the men had labouring jobs with the County Council or had fencing or general farm work which brought in regular wages. Nobody saved money-only the mad pakeha did that. All extra money and work went to the care of the local Marae. Here was the basis of the community. Regarding the drinking habits of these communities- the keg of beer at a parties was a sigh of generosity and hospitality. I even remember Mrs M *** [a Pakeha] making a critical remark regarding some social occasion when the number of kegs did not measure up to what was
considered acceptable. Not that the old lady drank alcohol herself but she must have absorbed some of the Maori ethos about what was tikanga [right]. Another point about Maori society of that period; social drinking with decorum was unknown. You either abstained from alcohol altogether or you drank to get drunk . Also of interest was the acceptance of heavy drinking of those families who did not use alcohol themselves. In one way or another they were all whanau and (in front of pakeha anyway) were not be be openly criticised. These observations are those of the outsider who found herself puzzled by the mysterious functioning of a society which seemed incredibly different from her own upbringing. There was much to admire and even to envy, but if you wanted to join them, as an alien pakeha, you almost had to become more Maori than the Maori. Perhaps it was only when they felt superior to you could they feel comfortable with you. What amazes me now is
that the Education Department in no way prepared Pakeha teachers for their entry into a Maori community. We knew no Maori protocol for marae behaviour and there were no books which were suggested reading. Only B**** [the neighbour] gave me the slightest hint of what was expected of me and she certainly didn't expand on the subject and I kept clear of direct questions as I knew (or suspected) these would receive very guarded answers, and sometimes even a veil of silence. '

Mum in her report writes that the local Maoris wore simple clothes. That is true for normal occasions. Their clothes sometimes in our eyes were incongruent. A dignified elderly lady wore a tea cozy as a hat on social nights. But the ceremonial occasions of weddings made a spectacle of the folk that might grace the pages of a high society magazine.

Scott and I rejoined our family at a Gisborne holiday camp. We would be living in a caravan for several weeks until our new house was furnished. I recall carnival joy.